S2D disk can't be removed due to minimal number of disk required

Question

we've got a 2-node S2D cluster, consisting of two Windows Server 2019 VM's hosted in Azure. Both VM's have one OS disk and two data disks attached. The data disks are added to a Storagepool using S2D. Both data disks are 256 GB in size.

Due too the need of adding more storage and someone messing up one of the disks, we are performing the following steps:

• added a 1 TB disk to both servers (this has been completed succesfully)
• removing one of the 256 GB disks on both servers

we performed the steps of removing using guides found all over. We got to the stage where the disks which are to be removed are retired. Now, when we try to remove the disks, we get the following error:
Remove-PhysicalDisk : One or more physical disks could not be removed. The policy on this storage pool requires a
minimum number of physical disks to remain present.

According to the S2D guides, a minimum of 2 disks is required in case of running S2D. Not sure why this ir preventing us to remove the disk, as we still have two disks per node available after removal.

why can't this action be performed?

Answer 1

Hello there,

Did you try checking the health of the S2D disks?

Maybe one of the disks is in an unhealthy state and hence you are getting this error message as this disk is not considered operational when trying to remove the disk.

Every storage pool has a health status - Healthy, Warning, or Unknown/Unhealthy, as well as one or more operational states.

Troubleshoot Storage Spaces and Storage Spaces Direct health and operational states https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-spaces/storage-spaces-states

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Answer 2

Hello,

the storage pool is healthy, as are the all the virtual and physical disks. Also, there is no storage job running. As far I can see, all lights show green to continue with removal of the disk, however server says no

with kind regards,

Laurence